DreamMessage and UTF

**grstearns** · 12-02-2009 01:28 PM

I've been playing around with the MediaWiki Converter and finally came the root of an issue I've been having for a while now.

When I send a page with certain utf codepoints such as “ it gets garbled somewhere. I thought it was happening in the bridge, but when I loaded up fiddler and watched what was being passed everything comes in and goes out just fine. It's sent as %E2%80%9C in the Post data and returns as the actual unicode bytes 0xE2 0x80 0x9C. A quick test with Curl confirms this.

However, when I look at the DreamMessage that is returned from Post() it shows up as

&#226;??

Which, after the ToDocument() comes out as

â??

I did find a brute force workaround, which is to pass the text through a function that just does a bunch of string.replace for all of these characters http://intertwingly.net/stories/2004/04/14/i18n.html . The trick is to send it as the HTML code. What's even better is that when they are sent to the xdoc, it kindly returns it to its UTF glory.

However, I can see this may come up later as an issue for someone else.

Also, I'm writing a guide to customizing the MW conversion process now that I've actually done it myself. It may be a good while until its ready though.

**SteveB** · 12-02-2009 07:07 PM

That's a good start to get to the bottom of this issue. Can you capture the request that you send into the bridge and the response? I'm especially interested in the response headers. If we can reproduce the issue, we should be able to address.

A converter guide would be AWESOME!!! Please do it!

**grstearns** · 12-02-2009 07:53 PM

Here's a quick proof of concept I built. I'm using dream v1.7.1.16671

Code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

using MindTouch.Dream;

namespace dreammessage_utf
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string text = "“€2”";
            string htmlText = "&ldquo;&euro;2&rdquo;";

            Plug p = Plug.New("http://mwc.mindtouch.com/");
            DreamMessage plain = p.With("title", "Test").With("text", text ).Post();
            DreamMessage escaped = p.With("title", "Test").With("text", htmlText).Post();

            XDoc plainDoc = plain.ToDocument();
            XDoc escapedDoc = escaped.ToDocument();
        }
    }
}

I sent the data to the public bridge, but if you look at the fiddler data below you'll see the issue is in the DreamMessage.

This is the conversation from "plain"

Code:

POST /?title=Test&text=%e2%80%9c%e2%82%ac2%e2%80%9d HTTP/1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
User-Agent: Dream/1.7.1.16671
Host: mwc.mindtouch.com
Content-Length: 0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:32:17 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Debian) PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 105
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<html xmlns:mediawiki="#mediawiki"><head><title>Test</title></head><body><p>“€2”
</p></body></html>

And here's from "escaped"

Code:

POST /?title=Test&text=%26ldquo;%26euro;2%26rdquo; HTTP/1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
User-Agent: Dream/1.7.1.16671
Host: mwc.mindtouch.com
Content-Length: 0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:32:20 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Debian) PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 116
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<html xmlns:mediawiki="#mediawiki"><head><title>Test</title></head><body><p>&ldquo;&euro;2&rdquo;
</p></body></html>

Here is the debugger values from visual studio for the DreamMessages

Code:

plain	{
<message>
	<status>200</status>
	<headers>
		<Vary>Accept-Encoding</Vary>
		<Connection>close</Connection>
		<Content-Length>105</Content-Length>
		<Content-Type>text/html</Content-Type>
		<Date>Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:32:17 GMT</Date>
		<Server>Apache/2.2.6 (Debian) PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8g</Server>
		<X-Powered-By>PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3</X-Powered-By>
	</headers>
	<body format="text">
&amp;lt;html xmlns:mediawiki=&amp;quot;#mediawiki&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;head&amp;gt;&amp;lt;title&amp;gt;Test&amp;lt;/title&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/head&amp;gt;&amp;lt;body&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;??????2???
&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/body&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/html&amp;gt;
	</body>
</message>
}	MindTouch.Dream.DreamMessage

Code:

escaped	{
<message>
	<status>200</status>
	<headers>
		<Vary>Accept-Encoding</Vary>
		<Connection>close</Connection>
		<Content-Length>116</Content-Length>
		<Content-Type>text/html</Content-Type>
		<Date>Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:32:20 GMT</Date>
		<Server>Apache/2.2.6 (Debian) PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8g</Server>
		<X-Powered-By>PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3</X-Powered-By>
	</headers>
	<body format="text">
&amp;lt;html xmlns:mediawiki=&amp;quot;#mediawiki&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;head&amp;gt;&amp;lt;title&amp;gt;Test&amp;lt;/title&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/head&amp;gt;&amp;lt;body&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;ldquo;&amp;amp;euro;2&amp;amp;rdquo;
&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/body&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/html&amp;gt;
	</body>
</message>
}	MindTouch.Dream.DreamMessage

And the XDocs...

Code:

plainDoc	{
<html xmlns:mediawiki="#mediawiki">
	<head>
		<title>Test</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>??????2???</p>
	</body>
</html>
}	MindTouch.Dream.XDoc

Code:

escapedDoc	{
<html xmlns:mediawiki="#mediawiki">
	<head>
		<title>Test</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>“€2”</p>
	</body>
</html>
}	MindTouch.Dream.XDoc

Hope this helps. I'll definitely keep working on the converter guide, but it's a massive topic. You guys did a lot of work (and I see a lot of comments starting with SteveB

)

**SteveB** · 12-02-2009 09:18 PM

Thanks a bunch! That made it really easy to track down.

The problem was that the response only had 'text/html' as content type, but it needed to have 'text/html; charset=utf-8'. I have local fix for it that will be checked in shortly. In case you have a local copy of the converter, you'll need the apply the following patch:

Code:

Index: index.php
===================================================================
--- index.php	(revision 17161)
+++ index.php	(working copy)
@@ -137,6 +137,9 @@
 // parse request text
 $result = $p->parse($text, $wgTitle, new ParserOptions);
 
+// set content-type for response
+header( "Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8" );
+
 // emit converted request text
 echo('<html xmlns:mediawiki="#mediawiki">');
 echo('<head>');

**grstearns** · 12-03-2009 12:44 PM

That did it! Thanks.

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